Scholars1 have long recognized the importance of military recruitment, supply and financing – the so-called business of war – for the economic development of early modern Europe.2 While the majority of this research has centred on how states either collected revenues for war-making or paid this money out to private military contractors, new strands in business history have turned towards the role of war in the development of early modern business practices.3 Rather than facile attempts to evaluate the positive or destructive role of war on the economy, this research has shown how war provided “an inexhaustible source of business opportunities, comparable only to consumer-driven trade expansion”, propelling changes in employment, logistics, investment, entrepreneurship, and firm organization.4 Instead of a class of entrepreneurs specializing only in war, military contractors acted as “the quintessential eighteenth-century capitalists”, adding war-work to their existing business portfolios and taking on military contracts for a range of financial,
This essay is about precisely one such demand peak; how such military actions blurred straightforward distinctions between state, semi-state and private operatives; and, conversely, how such military-demand requirements changed or left unaffected broader patterns of business development. Specifically, it examines the role of short-term Genoese military transporters during the second half of the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), the dispute over the Spanish throne between Louis XIV’s France and his Spanish allies and their opponents from the Grand Alliance of Great Britain, the Dutch United Provinces, Imperial Austria, and the Duchy of Savoy.7 While a number of excellent studies have examined Genoa’s state-run navy as well as more permanent, private naval contractors (asientistas de galeras), much less attention has been paid to small-scale, temporary naval transport-for-hire, people who made up what Gordan Bannerman has called in a different context the “sub-contractor state”.8 While it is not possible to calculate precisely what percentage of
1 Genoese Military Transport: An Overview
Ever since 1528, when Andrea Doria and Emperor Charles V signed a far-reaching contract (asiento) for the management of 12 galleys for the Spanish crown, Genoese aristocratic families such as the Doria, Centurione, Lomellini, Spinola, and De Mari had played a vital role in shipbuilding, financing and naval supply alongside the recruitment of maritime personnel.10 Due to its strategic position along the ‘Spanish Road’ to the Low Countries, Genoa served as a centre for military transport, and Genoese shipping merchants, either on their own initiative or as sub-contractors of the larger asientistas de galeras, shipped Spanish soldiers around the region.11 This business widened substantially
The precise terms of Genoese employment in the Bourbon armed forces remain unclear, however. Staunchly neutral throughout the conflict, the government of Genoa refused to provide galleys to the Franco-Spanish armies. Indeed, to strengthen their non-interventionalist claims, Genoa’s rulers instead offered vital transportation to diplomats, grandees, and their families under neutral banner including, among many, the wife of the Duke of Savoy, Anne Marie d’Orléans; the Spanish Viceroy to Sicily, Felipe Antonio Spinola, 4th Marquis of Los Balbases; the English ambassador Henry Newton; and the French commander Philippe de Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme.14 Surviving French naval records show that Genoese shipping merchants did not take on seasonal military transport directly from the French state. For example, no Genoese-registered vessels appear among the 31 ships that ferried 8,774 soldiers, 113 officers, and 245 horses from Provence to Alassio from 26 February to 15 March 1703 nor among the dozen ships moored in the port of Genoa that same year awaiting the transportation of over 2,000 French and Piedmontese infantry, although this does not preclude the possibility of Genoese captains working under false identity such as a certain “Captain Calcagno”, who transported 230 soldiers and 30 horses for the French around this time.15 Rather,
2 The Allied Convoy System and Transport-for-Hire (1707–12)
Regardless of how they were employed, the combination of relatively short transportation distances, an absence of significant enemy ships in the region, and pre-existing personal and business ties meant that private, short-term transporters in the Western Mediterranean before 1707 worked alone or in small numbers. This regional pattern of naval transport changed dramatically due to the Bourbon defeat at Turin in September 1706 and the subsequent shift of the Mediterranean theatre from Italy to Iberia. Beginning in December 1707 the Allies set up a complex transportation system whereby its wealthy members (the maritime powers of Great Britain and the United Provinces) promised to transport Austrian-Imperial soldiers as well as subsidized Prussian, Palatinate, Hessian and Grison troops to Catalonia, choosing to do so from Genoese Liguria because, as one British official remarked, “the expense of the transport [would] be much less and easier from the coast of Genoa than from any other place whatsoever.”19 Importantly, due to naval shortages, long travel distances, French privateers, underdeveloped maritime networks, and the
Yet the safety of such huge convoys came with steep downsides as Anglo-Dutch warships frequently arrived to the seaside late, under-manned and short of sufficient cargo room for their (also often tardy, miscounted, and ill) human and animal freight, forcing Allied agents to turn to Genoese trading vessels to fill the supply gaps on the fly. Most often, these agents began their frantic searches for transporters at the Loggia della Mercanzia/dei Mercanti (Loggia of Commerce/Merchants), the city’s merchant exchange. To find Genoese vessels in December 1707, John Chetwynd, envoy to the Duke of Savoy in Turin, hired an unnamed merchant conjointly with a naval officer who searched the city for available captains.22 The recruitment of troop transports was done on an ad-hoc basis, fitting the immediate needs of the moment such as when British admiral John Leake, having arrived at Vado with insufficient space to transport Austrian-Imperial cavalry in 1709, sent his attaché, James Croft, to rent as many ships as he could and deliver them to Vado for service to Barcelona.23 Beyond the exchange, Allied agents further used less formal commercial settings such as banquets and the city’s two theatres, the Teatro Falcone and Teatro Sant’Agostino, to solicit shipping merchants to take up military transport. State-sponsored avvisi from Vienna, for example, report the common sight of German and British officers at performances such as the handful of Austrian-Imperial cavalrymen who watched a performance of La caduta dei decemviri in late 1701; a group of Hessian officers awaiting embarkation to Iberia who took in one of the first performances of Turno Aricino in October 1707; or the British Admiral John Jennings, who visited the city’s opera while preparing to escort 2,444 men and 720 horses from Vado in November 1711.24
Complicating matters further, the Chetwynds, van der Meer, and other Allied agents had to compete for the same Genoese ships with their Bourbon opponents, Bourbon-aligned asientistas, the Genoese state and, of course, private commercial firms. Despite the collapse of the Bourbon position in Italy,
Indeed, the sheer quantity of Genoese ships transporting soldiers for the various combatants around the Riviera di Ponente in these years threatened to breach the city’s neutrality and bring its merchants into open war with each other. In 1708, for example, four papal galleys accompanying Genoese transports from Avignon to support the papal campaign against Joseph I narrowly averted firing on two English men-of-war escorting a further four rented Genoese ships with 1,000 recruits for Barcelona only “because of the tranquillity (of the sea)” prevented them from catching up to their quarry.33 An even more precarious moment occurred the following year when the Allies failed to find Genoese transports for Barcelona and nearly declared war on the republic. The conflict arose in spring 1709 when the Genoese government, fearing famine, hired the bulk of their trading vessels and sent them to Greece and the Levant in order to secure vital grain supplies. This order had serious consequences for
Ports of destination for Genoese Navi di Guerra, 1708–11
| Year | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1708 | 1709 | 1710 | 1711 | ||
| Port of Destination | Atlantic Ports | 0 (0%) | 0 (0%) | 3,600 (3%) | 0 (0%) |
| Adriatic Ports | 1,300 (4%) | 3,200 (3%) | 3,225 (3%) | 0 (0%) | |
| Greece | 11,850 (37%) | 62,310 (66%) | 28,675 (28%) | 800 (3%) | |
| Iberia & Balearics | 8,400 (26%) | 18,130 (19%) | 42,930 (41%) | 25,750 (88%) | |
| France/Provence | 0 (0%) | 1,125 (1%) | 1,700 (2%) | 0 (0%) | |
| Levant | 0 (0%) | 2,650 (3%) | 3,350 (3%) | 0 (0%) | |
| North Africa | 3,650 (12%) | 2,425 (3%) | 10,350 (10%) | 1,850 (6%) | |
| Tyrrhenian Ports | 6,600 (21%) | 4,450 (5%) | 10,225 (10%) | 1,000 (3%) | |
| Totals Tonnage | 31,800 (100%) | 94,290 (100%) | 104,055 (100%) | 29,400 (100%) | |
SOURCE: ASG, CM, 406 (VISITE DELLE NAVI DI GUERRA).
Note: Ports of Destination included Atlantic Ports (Africa [Ambiguous], Amsterdam, Canary Islands, London), Adriatic Ports (Ancona, Ragusa, Venice), Greece (The Archipelago, Morea, Naplion), Iberia & Balearics (Alicante, Barcelona, Cartagena, Lisbon, Malaga, Majorca, Port Mahon, Spanish Coast [Ambiguous]), France/Provence (Marseille, Nice), Levant (Gallipoli, Levant [Ambiguous], Smyrna/Izmir), North Africa (Bizerte, Tabarka, Tripoli, Tunis), Tyrrhenian Ports (Civitavecchia, Livorno, Naples, Sicily). Voyages for 1708 and 1711 do not record the entire year, but July-December 1708 and January-April 1711. Many ships occur multiple times in the records with some ships visiting multiple ports, which has been accounted for in the table. The records show 29 voyages for 1708, 70 in 1709, 104 in 1710, and 35 in 1711.
Second, the importation of vital foodstuffs to the city opened up opportunities for French intermediaries to smuggle grain, much of it on Genoese ships, to feed famine-ravaged Marseille and other places in Provence.34 “The French did begin to buy up corn at this place and I find that they let none slip, a ship
Although little came of Chetwynd’s complaints in the end, the circumstances of the whole episode are worth reflection. A British agent had threatened war when he had been unable to employ Genoese merchants to ship out German-speaking troops to Spain because the neutral republic’s government had already employed these captains to bring grain to the city, some of whom then had taken up smuggling for the French supported by a Genoese asientista. The inherent complexity of the military transport-for-hire market made Allied agents at times try to avoid foreign hired help altogether and move troops on state-owned vessels. William Chetwynd, for instance, noted in October 1708 how British men-of-war would “save the Queen the expense of hiring transports”, even suggesting that a regiment of Grison foot soldiers bound for Barcelona later that year could serve makeshift marines providing “good service for the defence of her Majesties Ships.”38 “My former orders from Lord Sunderland in relation to sending away recruits for Spain were to put them aboard the men-of-war at least so many as they will carry to save the expense of transports
Further proposals for the use of state transports met with similar refusals, and as a consequence, the Chetwynds and other Allied agents hired a number of Genoese captains on short-term contracts. While to date I have been unable to discover one of these arrangements (such is the difficulty of examining what was admittedly a transitory, often one-time business), diplomatic correspondences reveal a good deal about their contents. We know, for instance, that transport-for-hire contracts specified the price of each soldier per-head; that they detailed how captains were to be compensated either through cash, bills of exchange, or other credit devices; and that they included routes and delivery times of troops, a necessity given that captains almost always returned from Catalonia with commercial freight. We know furthermore that this entire process became substantially more complicated when shipping cavalry. Horses required not only fodder, but purpose-built stables to hold them. A British government report made in 1707–08 calculated that, including food (oats, hay, biscuit, wine, pork, rice, beans, oil, and cheese) and stables, shipping a unit of 100 cavalrymen from Genoa to Barcelona would cost 19 Genoese lire per man, but 165 lire per horse.40 Moreover, building stables took time and energy, making the precise timing of convoys even more difficult while the extra time it took to load thousands of horses aboard could prove deadly to the animals, 42 dying in one ship in August 1712 as it lay off Vado.41 Faced with such stark propositions, John Chetwynd suggested in January 1708 that the British should simply hire Genoese cavalry transports on a permanent footing because he was unsure if he could “find vessels enough in these seas for the transport of all the horse at one time”, going on to explain that “making use of the same transports” would “save the expense of the stables.”42 Chetwynd’s advice was ignored, however, and for the remainder of the conflict the Allies only occasionally recruited cavalry transports, drawing on state-owned vessels out of British-controlled
Whether transiting people or animals, transport contracts contained specific dates for the duration of service in order to prevent “the masters of the transports cheating both the Queen and soldiers.”44 “What is proper to be done about punishing the Masters of Transports for breach of Contract by not being ready to sail on the 12th inst. as stipulated?” John Chetwynd asked a certain Captain Butler when Genoese transports hired to transport a regiment of Grisons arrived past their November 1708 start date.45 Anglo-Dutch contractors moreover had to be careful not to hire too many ships at Genoa nor contract transports too early in a campaign. “The admiral promised to let me have the convoy which I wait for with great impatience, having found the necessary transports for their embarkation, for which we must pay so much a day should not the Men-of-War arrive before the 17th of this month”, William Chetwynd worried in May 1709 in preparation for sending 2,278 Austrian-Imperial and Italian troops, adding three weeks later how, in the absence of a British convoy, his situation had turned even worse. “The transports I have hired are so much a day till [the convoy] arrives”, Chetwynd grumbled, “this does not a little vex me thou there is no avoiding it being obliged to fix a time if we will take up transports.”46 Furthermore, it is clear that these agreements circulated around the broader information economy of Genoa, and deliberately contained falsehoods meant to hamper enemy intelligence. When Tursis, Uceda and Lacoli hired numerous Genoese barks for their failed Sardinian revolt in 1710, for example, the contracts (according to William Chetwynd who read them personally) specified that the ships were not to pass near Naples, Sicily or Sardinia, a ruse meant to “blind the designs they are doubtless on against the latter place [e.g., Sardinia].”47 Finally, it is important to note that troop transportation did not necessarily imply employment as all the war’s belligerents at times forced Genoese shipping merchants to transport soldiers against their will. In March 1710, for instance, the Bourbon authorities in Sicily coerced two Genoese and two Venetian ships bound for the Levant to transport 600 soldiers, provisions and artillery to Porto Longone instead.48
Among those investigated were the Chetwynd brothers, John in Turin and William in Genoa, who the commissioners ordered to produce all “original contracts & vouchers” in order to determine “whether the stores, mules, oxen, carriages, corn etc. [had] been actually provided pursuant the contracts and at the prices usually allowed in that country in the summer season.” The resultant report tells us a number of things about the inner workings of the brothers’ military transport-for-hire operations at Genoa. For one, it makes clear that the Chetwynds relied on an intermediary, Joseph Boüer, “a person whom Mr. Chetwynd [had] employed” who charged “4 percent for his commission, upon almost all the expenses for these several imbarkations, except for the provisions put on board the ships.” Boüer was a well-known Allied contractor. A merchant, Huguenot, and former British consul at Nice, Boüer had
3 The Convoy of December 1707: A Case Study
Unfortunately, the commissioners interviewed none of the captains Chetwynd and Boüer hired, so we cannot know what “other merchandise”, gratis or otherwise, these ships carried. To get some sense of how military transport fit into existing business networks, we have to turn instead to our second text of note: one of the few surviving embarkation rolls of an Allied convoy from Vado to Barcelona in late 1707. Patterned on a troop muster and replicated in its original form in Tables 13.2 and 13.3, two copies of this three-page document survive owing to the complex political economy of the Grand Alliance whereby British
British & Dutch ships and captains for December 1707 embarkation
| Commander’s Name | The Ship’s Names | Numbers of the heads appoint to be carried as given in by their general | Souldiers put on board of each ship with their officers included | Number of the women put on board of each ship | Number of the children put on board each ship |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| John Hubbard | Elizabeth | 100 | 104 | 1 | ---- |
| Robert Wyne | Norffolke | 100 | 106 | ---- | ---- |
| Francis Dove | Starling Castle | 100 | 102 | 1 | ---- |
| Thomas Bucklar | Warspight | 80 | 103 | 2 | ---- |
| … Hughes | Winchester | 80 | 64 | 5 | 1 |
| Joseph Taylor | Tryton | 50 | 38 | ---- | ---- |
| … Jackson | Surloings | 50 | ---- | ---- | ---- |
| Philip Stanhope | Milford | 40 | 43 | ---- | ---- |
| Henry Hammond | Antelope | 300 | 289 | 44 | 29 |
| Jacob Sanders | Smyrna Factor Hosp. | 240 | 261 | 37 | 17 |
| Joseph Bumsted | Mathews Hospital | 250 | 235 | 30 | 15 |
| Thomas Robertson | Jeffreys Hospital | 300 | 298 | 38 | 11 |
| Ambrose Laurence | Yarmouth Fregat | 270 | 233 | 30 | 16 |
| William Long | Charity | 110 | 54 | 10 | 1 |
| Ralph Robinson | Priscilla | 180 | 150 | 20 | 12 |
| John Ayres | Hopewell | 100 | 79 | 11 | 8 |
| John Thomas | Ann Galley | 100 | 84 | 19 | 9 |
| William Dunkean | Friends Goodwill | 110 | 93 | 15 | 12 |
| Samuel Ingram | Lisbon Factor | 40 | 40 | ---- | ---- |
| John Alkins | Samuel & Anne | 150 | 139 | 22 | 8 |
| Richard Hammond | Blessing | 70 | 29 | 9 | 6 |
| Samuel Brookes | Samuel | 180 | 119 | 24 | 7 |
| William Erle | Phoenix | 180 | 150 | 22 | 4 |
| Richard Daniel | Amiable | 160 | 127 | 26 | 11 |
| James Gillery | William & Barbary | 160 | 138 | 24 | 14 |
| Edward Constant | Constant True Love | 90 | 85 | 16 | 8 |
| William Abbet | Providence | 120 | 69 | 9 | ---- |
| Robert Taylor | Prosperous | 80 | 70 | 11 | 4 |
| John Burford | Queen | 80 | 69 | 11 | 7 |
| Robert Spilman | Delight | 38 | 38 | ---- | ---- |
| James Gother | Maidstone | 100 | 89 | 14 | 11 |
| John Buckler | Swan Frigat | 140 | 84 | 16 | 8 |
| Thomas Wales | Mary & Margaret | 70 | 40 | ---- | ---- |
| Thomas Childistone | Barcelona | 140 | 70 | 13 | 4 |
| Thomas Bandinel | Anna | 100 | 79 | 13 | 7 |
| Dutch Men of War Viz | Wasemaer | 100 | 100 | ---- | ---- |
| Veer | 80 | 80 | ---- | ---- | |
| Summa Totalis of each Column | 4640 | 3911 | 493 | 230 | |
Short-term transport ships and captains for December 1707 embarkation
| Commander’s Names | The Transport Ship’s as they are named | The Number of the heads were fraughted for carrie by the undertakers | The Number of the heads they were judged only able to carrie by the Commander | The number of the heads on board according to the signed list of the Collonel | The number of Persons as reviewed on board of each ship by her Majet’s envoy according to their quality | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Officers | Souldiers | Servants | Wives | Children | Totals | |||||
| G. Lorenzo Bigheri | Grand Madre di Dio | 380 | 340 | 340 | 8 | 300 | 10 | 8 | 3 | 329 |
| Giuseppe Clausel | Barca S. Pietro (or Il S. Christo) | 160 | 140 | 140 | 6 | 115 | 12 | 6 | 1 | 140 |
| Francesco Decotto | N. S. del Carminé e S. Niccolò | 350 | 320 | 320 | 10 | 260 | 15 | 10 | 7 | 302 |
| Fran. Maria Rapallo | S. Chiara | 350 | 320 | 307 | 9 | 260 | 12 | 6 | 4 | 291 |
| Christian Dopft | Il Ré Giulelmo | 150 | 150 | 150 | 5 | 135 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 150 |
| Valentino Mingotti | Gli Due Fratelli | 200 | 200 | 200 | 10 | 160 | 12 | 7 | 5 | 194 |
| Gio. Battista Merizano | Trionfo di Gloria | 200 | 200 | 196 | 7 | 160 | 7 | 6 | 1 | 181 |
| Fran. Maria Grecco | Nostra Signora Rosario | 115 | 115 | 115 | 6 | 90 | 6 | 8 | – | 110 |
| G. Battista Calcagno | S. Maria Maddalena | 400 | 370 | 370 | 15 | 289 | 8 | 7 | 5 | 324 |
| G. Antonio Ferro | S. Antonio di Padova e S. Bonaventura | 350 | 330 | 330 | 19 | 300 | 4 | 16 | 6 | 345 |
| Damiano Tixe | S. Orsola | 210 | 210 | 210 | 15 | 200 | 5 | 10 | 6 | 236 |
| P. Battista Amerigo | Gallera S. Pietro | 140 | 106 | 95 | – | 80 | – | – | – | 80 |
| Summ Totall of the Columns | 3305 | 3051 | 3023 | 125 | 2544 | 85 | 103 | 50 | 2927 | |
SOURCE: BL, ADD MS 61526, FOLS. 154R, 158R, AND 160R; HANA, 1.02.03, REG. 54, UNFOLIATED.
Note: Two versions of this document exist with minor numerical and spelling differences. I have tried to provide the more accurate spelling of each name and maintain the format of the original document.
Nevertheless, this flotilla offers a microcosm of the recruitment, contracting, and politics of short-term military transport.54 What is immediately obvious is the stark difference between state transports and hired ones. John Chetwynd, who did the accounting, divided the document between state and contracted vessels, with 35 English and two Dutch ships – some men-of-war like the Dutch vessels Wasenaer and Veer, others hastily-refitted frigates (Yarmouth, Norffolke, Winchester, Milford) or hospitals (Jeffreys, Mathews, Smyrna Factor) – carrying 4,634 Palatinate infantry, while twelve contractors carried the 2,927 Austrian and Italian infantry of the regiments of Raventelau and Bomezana, respectively. A close look at these dozen contracted ships suggests their captains had a range of motivations for taking on military transport-for-hire. Seven were Genoese, their ships registered with the Magistracy of the Conservatori del Mare, the office with jurisdiction over maritime issues. These
Whether Mingotti felt that transporting soldiers differed little from seafood is not clear, but what is obvious is that all these captains took on military transport duty only temporarily and in full expectation of returning from Catalonia or elsewhere with commercial goods. We know Catalonia was to be the convoy’s first (and, as it related to the transporters, only) destination precisely because the ships did not follow that course. Rather, on the insistence of Archduke Charles (the Allied candidate for the Spanish throne), the fleet detoured in an ultimately worthless attempt to drum up support for an anti-Bourbon revolt on Sardinia, thus violating the terms of the transporters’ contracts. “Their contracts being made to go straight for Barcelona … I hope your lordship will be pleased to send the Queen’s orders to authorize my joining with my Dutch friend in the necessary expense for the satisfying of those people”, William Chetwynd wrote Lord Sunderland in March 1708.61 Evidently, his request was granted, and a number of the captains continued to contribute to the Allied war effort for years to come. After transporting troops to Spain that December, Francesco Decotto (Nostra Signora del Carmine e S. Niccolò) journeyed to Sicily and the Morea repeatedly over the next two years (presumably to buy the aforementioned grain during the famine year of 1709) before heading back to British-controlled Port Mahon in January 1711, a pattern Francesco Maria Rapallo (Santa Chiara) and Damiano Tixe (Santa Orsola) followed as well, returning to Spain in 1710–11 after a year of working the route to Greece.62 So, too, did Giovanni Battista Merizano (Trionfo di Gloria) first return to Spain eight months after shipping troops there, then move grain from Greece and Naples after that in 1709 before travelling to London in April 1710, presumably due to connections he made two-and-a-half years earlier.63 Again, the larger aggregate picture of Genoese state-sponsored trade revealed in the records of
In the end, the degree to which Merizano, Rapallo, Decotto and others considered military transport an essential part of their business is not yet clear. What is obvious, however, is that by 1712 the Chetwynds had built a long list of contacts in Genoa and gained significant knowledge about the transportation of soldiers to Catalonia. Their built-up expertise and networks were laid bare in March 1712 when the British ceased providing funds for the transport of further Austrian-Imperial troops to Spain and forced the Austrians to hire transports on their own. Perplexed at the whole process, the Duke of Uceda (who had defected to the Austrian-Imperial camp two years earlier and now was tasked with fighting a losing effort in Catalonia) sought William Chetwynd’s advice on how to coordinate the embarkation of 6,000 Austrian-Imperial troops from Vado. “[The duke] made to get information both of the persons I employed and myself of the methods taken to subsist the soldiers and made me fancy he may have direction to provide the necessaries in case I refused to take it upon me”, Chetwynd wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth, adding how he feared that the duke, “being unacquainted with the usual methods”, lacked the skill needed to synchronize Anglo-Dutch warships, Genoese transports, and German-speaking troops.64 Chetwynd was right; the duke botched the whole operation, ordering a dozen smaller ships at Genoa and a pair of navi di guerra to ferry the soldiers, missing his Anglo-Dutch escort multiple times, and nearly sparking a mutiny among the soldiers stranded at Vado, all of which contributed to the deteriorating situation in Catalonia and hastened the end of the war the next year.65
Yet even peace – and the inevitable movement around the Mediterranean of soldiers and sailors that followed – offered Genoese captains ample military transport opportunities. On the Allied side, within days of the signing of the Peace of Utrecht (April 1713), William Chetwynd sought to “rent all the ships that he could to be able to send them to Catalonia” to evacuate the remaining German troops, hiring dozens of Genoese ships to ferry over 15,500 soldiers from Spain over the next few months, 11,000 of which landed at Sampierdarena just outside Genoa.66 On the Bourbon side in 1713, the victorious Philip V signed an asiento with the Genoese nobleman Stefano de Mari, who would replace the Duke of Tursis after the latter’s fall from favour in 1715 and
Indeed, for the rest of the century, Genoese shipping merchants continued to serve a vital role in military transport both voluntarily and involuntarily, taking part in the Spanish expedition to Oran (1732) as well as the Second Morean War (1714–18) and the wars of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–20), Polish
4 Conclusions
Scholars have argued that the 18th century was when the state – either directly through bureaucratic forms or indirectly through state-funded, private military contractors – finally took over military employment, finance, supply and transportation, while a rich body of scholarship over the last two decades has made clear the various ways individual entrepreneurs entangled themselves into the business of war despite swings in state demand. This study shifts our attention away from permanent/semi-permanent contractors towards more temporary forms of war-work exemplified through Genoese military transporters. As consuls Winder and Keene hinted at, military transports-for-hire fell along a continuum between the purely coercive and the purely commercial as captains like Francesco Decotto, Giovanni Battista Merizano, Valentino Mingotti, Paolo Luigetti and others moved soldiers with varying degrees of ease along (and occasional outside of) existing commercial routes. Along the way, these men entangled themselves into a strikingly wide variety of employment relationships: as Genoese subjects feeding their nearly-starved city; as French-employed smugglers working (at least on paper) against the republic’s wishes; as temporary, private employees moving German-speaking troops
It is an unfortunate fact that short of finding the records of one of these firms, we are left with seeing transporters through the eyes of the states that employed them: through Anglo-Dutch muster rolls, Genoese reimbursement schemes, Austrian-Imperial state-approved avvisi, French navy contracts, British parliamentarian investigations, and other state sources. For this reason, this essay’s findings for now remain more suggestive than definitive. Nevertheless, they open up provocative questions about patterns of socialization and business organization of military enterprise. If, as many have argued, early modern maritime business relied first and foremost on intimate social ties, did military transporters-for-hire build trust and rapport with employers without long-term bonds or were the men Chetwynd hired in 1707 already enmeshed in existing networks yet to be discovered?74 If, rather than individuals, Genoa’s captains worked as representatives of established merchant houses and large partnerships, could such diffuse networks anticipate and price-in military transport to their expected profits, and, if so, what can this tell us about the larger history of the relationship between war and pre-modern capitalism?75
Whatever the answers to these questions, the labour fluidity of Genoa’s military transporters is an important reminder that when it comes to pre-modern employment, “the notion of occupation was understood differently than it is today, a distinction often lost in long-termism.”76 In their military-transport work, Genoese captains defy stable, modern categories like ‘state employee’, ‘privateer’, ‘smuggler’, ‘contractor’, ‘asientista’ or, indeed, ‘military entrepreneur’.77
I would like to thank the editors of the volume, André Holenstein and Philippe Rogger, for the invitation to contribute as well as Peter Wilson for kindly reading an earlier draft of this essay. All translations and transcriptions are my own unless otherwise noted. All dates are given in the ‘new style’ or Gregorian calendar.
Recent examples include Roger Knight, Martin Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet, 1793–1815: War, the British Navy, and the Contractor State (Woodbridge, 2010); The Contractor State and its Implications (1659–1815), eds. Richard Harding, Sergio Solbes Ferri (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2012); The Spending of States: Military Expenditure During the Long Eighteenth Century: Patterns, Organization and Consequences, 1650–1815, eds. Stephen Conway, Rafael Torres-Sánchez (Saarbrücken, 2011); War, Entrepreneurs, and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean, 1300–1800, ed. Jeff Fynn-Paul (Leiden, 2014); Rafael Torres-Sánchez, Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2016).
See especially the articles in the 2018 special issue of Business History: “The Business of War,” Business History 60:1 (2018), 4–125. A notable example from the late medieval period is William P. Caferro, “Warfare and Economy in Renaissance Italy, 1350–1450,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39:2 (2008), 167–209.
Pepijn Brandon, Marjolein ‘t Hart, and Rafael Torres-Sánchez, “War and Economy: Rediscovering the Eighteenth-Century Military Entrepreneur,” Business History 60:1 (2018), 4–22, p. 4.
Brandon, ‘t Hart, Torres-Sánchez, “War and Economy,” p. 11.
David Plouviez, “The French Navy and War Entrepreneurs: Identity, Business Relations, Conflicts, and Cooperation in the Eighteenth Century,” Business History 60:1 (2018), 41–56, p. 43.
On the city’s role during the war see: Riccardo Dellepiane, Paolo Giacomone Piana, “Le leve corse della Repubblica di Genova: Dalla pace di Ryswick al Trattato di Utrecht (1697–1713),” Atti della società ligure di storia patria, n.s., 36 (1996), 427–446; Giovanni Assereto, “La guerra di Successione spagnola dal punto di vista genovese,” Atti della società ligure di storia patria, n.s., 51 (2011), 539–584; Christopher Storrs, “Negotiating the Transition from Spanish to Austrian Habsburg Italy: Non-Spanish Italy and the War of the Spanish Succession (c. 1700–1713/14),” in The War of the Spanish Succession: New Perspectives, eds. Matthias Pohlig, Michael Schaich (Oxford, 2017), 131–157; Michael P. Martoccio, “‘The Place for such Business’: The Business of War in the City of Genoa, 1701–1714,” War in History 29:2 (2022), 302–322.
Vilma Borghesi, “Il magistrate delle galee (1559–1607),” Miscellanea storica ligure, n.s., 3:1 (1971), 189–223; Thomas Kirk, Genoa and the Sea: Policy and Power in an Early Modern Mari-time Republic (Baltimore, 2005); Luca Lo Basso “Una difficile esistenza: Il duca di Tursi, gli asientos di galee e la squadra di Genova tra guerra navale, finanza e intrighi politici (1635–1643),” Atti della società ligure di storia patria, n.s., 51 (2011), 819–846; idem, “Gli asientisti del re: L’esercizio private della guerra nelle strategie economiche dei Genovesi (1528–1716),” in Mediterraneo in armi (secc. XV–XVIII), ed. Rossella Cancila, 2 (Palermo, 2007), 397–428; Benoît Maréchaux, “Los asentistas de galeras genoveses y la articulación naval de un imperio policéntrico (siglos XVI–XVII),” Hispania 80 (2020), 47–76; idem, “Business Organisation in the Mediterranean Sea: Genoese Galley Entrepreneurs in the Service of the Spanish Empire (Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries),” Business History 65 (2023), 56–87. See more generally I.A.A. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, 1560–1620 (London, 1976), pp. 163–205; Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 1986); Jan Glete, Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies, and State Building in Europe and America, 1500–1860, 1–2 (Stockholm, 1993); Louis Sicking, “Selling and Buying Protection: Dutch War Fleets at the Service of Venice (1617–1667),” Studi veneziani, n.s., 67 (2013), 89–106; Christopher Storrs, “Fleets and States in a Composite Catholic Monarchy: Spain c. 1500–1700,” in Ideologies of Western Naval Power, c. 1500–1815, eds. J.D. Davies, Alan James, & Gijs Rommelse (New York, 2016), 85–105; Gordan Bannerman, “The Impact of War: New Business Networks and Small-Scale Contracts in Britain, 1739–1770,” Business History 60:1 (2018), 23–40, p. 24.
Giada Pizzoni, British Catholic Merchants in the Commercial Age, 1670–1714 (Woodbridge, 2020), p. 62.
Maréchaux, “Business Organisation in the Mediterranean Sea”.
Antonio José Rodríguez Hernández, “Al servicio del rey: Reclutamiento y transporte de soldados italianos a España para luchar en la Guerra contra Portugal (1640–1668),” Guerra e pace in età moderna: Annali di storia militare europea 4 (2012), 229–275; Manuel Herrero Sánchez, “Génova y el sistema imperial hispánico,” in La Monarquía de las naciones: Patria, Nación y Naturaleza en la Monarquía de España, eds. Antonio Álvarez-Ossorio, Bernardo J. García García (Madrid, 2004), 529–562.
Il bombardamento di Genova nel 1684: Atti della Giornata di Studio nel Terzo Centenario (Genoa, 1988).
Martoccio, “‘The Place for such Business’,” table 1.
London, British Library [BL], Add MS 61521, fols. 59r–60r, 66r, 71r, 74r–75r, 76r, 90r–V, 111r–112r, and 186r–187r; Kew, The National Archives, Kew [TNA], State Papers [SP], 79/3, fols. 716r, 732r, and 817r–818r.
Genoa, Archivio di Stato di Genova [ASG], Archivio Secreto [AS], 2928, unfoliated, 26 February 1703, 5 March 1703, 8 March 1703, and 15 March 1703; Vincennes, Service Historique de la Défense [SHD], Fonds de l’armée de Terre, Série – A, 1693, Etat des Bastimens qui sont dans le Port de Gennes. …
Christopher Storrs, The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy, 1665–1700 (Oxford, 2006), p. 71. The remaining parts of the Spanish galley fleet, which totaled 29 in 1677, drew from the squadrons of Naples (eight galleys), Spain (six), Sicily (five), and Sardinia (two). Also, David Goodman, Spanish Naval Power, 1589–1665 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 13, 62–63, 134, and 218.
Storrs, “Negotiating the Transition,” p. 141.
The Diplomatic Correspondence of the Right Hon. Richard Hill, ed. William L. Blackley (London, 1845), p. 479.
BL, Add MS 61526, fols. 169r–170v.
BL, Add MS 61522, fol. 6r.
Martoccio, “‘The Place for such Business’,” table 1.
BL, Add MS 61526, fols. 54r–57r.
TNA, SP, 79/6, fols. 66r–67v.
BL, Add MS 61521, fols. 107r–108r; TNA, SP, 79/6, fols. 152r–153v; Il Corriere ordinario: Av[v]isi italiani straordinarii [CO], ed. Giovanni van Ghelen, 1–38 (Vienna 1701–14), Genoa, 19 November 1707, 26 October 1711, and 21 November 1711; Fausto Nicolini, L’Europa durante la guerra di successione di spagna, 3 (Naples, 1937), Doc. 819.
This letter is reprinted in Stephen Martin-Leake, The Life of Sir John Leake, Rear-Admiral of Great Britain, 2 (London, 1920), p. 225.
Stafford, UK, Staffordshire Record Office [SRO], Chetwynd of Ingestre MS [Chetwynd MS], D649.15, unfoliated, John Chetwynd to Leake, n.d. (May 1708); BL, Add MS 61526, fols. 190r–191r; BL, Add MS 61527, fols. 51r–52v.
Martin-Leake, The Life of Sir John Leake, 2, pp. 224–225, 232.
BL, Add MS 61519, fols. 65r, 70r, 71v.
Den Haag, Nationaal Archief [HaNA], 1.02.03 (Van der Meer, 1690–1713), Reg. 54, unfoliated. I want to thank Jeannette Kamp and Loek Luiten for pointing out this source to me.
BL, Add MS 61522, fols. 171r–172r, 175r–V, 177r–178r, and 183r–184r; BL, Add MS 61523, fols. 208r–209r, 212r–213r, 214r–215r, 222r–223v, and 225r–V; TNA, SP, 79/3, fols. 38r–39v; TNA, SP, 79/5, fols. 54r–55v, 60r–V, and 70r–71v. See also Dellepiane, Piana, “Le leve corse,” p. 443.
TNA, SP, 79/5, fols. 54r–55v, 60r–V.
TNA, SP, 79/5, fols. 75r–76v.
BL, Add MS 61527, fols. 51r–52v.
Marcel Lachiver, Les années misère: La famine au temps du grand roi, 1680–1720 (Paris, 1991); W. Gregory Monahan, The Year of Sorrows: The Great Famine of 1709 in Lyon (Columbus, Ohio, 1993).
BL, Add MS 61523, fols. 123r–124v, 125r–126v, 156r–158r, and 162r–164r.
BL, Add MS 61523, fols. 117r–120r, and 162r–164r.
BL, Add MS 61523, fols. 171r–172v, and 173r–174r.
BL, Add MS 61527, fols. 142r–143r, and 144r–145r.
SRO, Chetwynd MS, D649.15, unpaginated foils, John Chetwynd to Byng, 5 March 1709; John Chetwynd to Byng, 17 April 1709. Also, BL, Add MS 61523, fols. 89r–90r.
BL, Add. MS 6144, fol. 147r.
TNA, SP, 79/5, fols. 567r–V; TNA, SP, 79/6, fols. 258r–259r.
BL, Add MS 61526, fols. 171r–173r.
For an exception, see TNA, SP, 79/6, fols. 254r–V, 258r–259r, and 262r–V.
SRO, Chetwynd MS, SRO D649.15, unfoliated, John Chetwynd to James Brydges, 24 July 1708.
SRO, Chetwynd MS, SRO D649.15, unfoliated, John Chetwynd to Butler, 14 November 1708.
BL, Add MS 61523, fols. 97r–98r, 105r–106r.
BL, Add MS 61522, fols. 177r–178r. Also, BL, Add MS 61523, fols. 214r–215r.
BL, Add MS 61522, fols. 169r–170r.
Two identical versions exist of this document. TNA, SP, 109/1, fols. 41r–47r and TNA, T, 1/148, fols. 4r–9v. A further printed copy of parts of the commissioners’ report was published in 1728 following the siege of Gibraltar the previous year, although the report of the Genoese transports was omitted. The Report of the Commissioners sent into Spain … (London, 1728).
BL, Add MS 61526, fols. 183r–185v.
See generally Caleb Karges, “The Logistics of the Allied War Effort in the Mediterranean,” in Der Spanische Erbfolgekrieg (1701–1714) und seine Auswirkungen, eds. Katharina Arnegger et al. (Vienna, 2019), 95–118; and idem, “Britain, Austria, and the ‘Burden of War’ in the Western Mediterranean, 1703–1708,” International Journal of Military History and Historiography 39 (2019), 8–32.
BL, Add MS 61521, fols. 140r–141r. Vienna, Österreichisches Staatsarchiv [ÖStA], Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv [HHStA], Staatenabteilungen [StAbt], Italienische Staaten, Genua, Reg. 1, Berichte des Gesandten Comte Karl Molinari v. Genua v. König Karl III. (1707–1710), fols. 75r–78v. I would like to thank Katalin Pataki for drawing my attention to this source.
BL, Add MS 61526, fols. 122r–124r.
BL, Add MS 61526, fols. 154r, 156r, 158r, and 160r.
ASG, Giunta di Marina, filze 15, 16; ASG, Conservatori del mare [CM], filza 434. See also Luciana Gatti, Navi e cantieri della Repubblica di Genova (secoli XVI–XVIII) (Genoa, 1999), pp. 387, 388, and 391. On Lomellini see Cesare Cattaneo Mallone di Novi, Gli hospitalieri di San Giovanni a Genova (Genoa, 1994), pp. 175–177.
Delle assicurazioni marittime trattato del Cavaliere Ascanio Baldasseroni (Florence, 1803), p. 217.
Catalogo dell’esposizione in occasion della Marcia Internazionale (n.p., 2008), p. 13. Available at https://www.arenzanotracieloemare.it/IMMAGINI/2008_09_13_MOSTRA_SECOLO_DEI_RE/SecoloRe.pdf.
ASG, CM, Atti Civili, 125, Case # 282 & 302; ASG, CM, Atti Civili, 135, Case # 223. I want to thank the Average-Transaction Costs and Risk Management group at the University of Exeter as well as Andrea Zappia for bringing these sources to my attention.
CO, Genoa, 13 May 1705, 2 August 1705; CO, Livorno, 7 August 1705.
ASG, Giunta della Marina, 34, unfoliated, Reperitur in libro orientali. …
BL, Add MS 61526, fols. 225r–226v.
ASG, CM, filza 406, unfoliated, 17 October 1708, 29 November 1708, 28 June 1709, 14 July 1709, 21 August 1709, 14 November 1709, 21 January 1710, 4 June 1710, 19 August 1710, 14 January 1711, and 27 February 1711.
ASG, CM, filza 406, unfoliated, 27 August 1708, 3 April 1709, 9 August 1709, 31 August 1709, and 16 April 1710.
TNA, SP, 79/5, fols. 513r–514r, 529r.
TNA, SP, 79/5, fols. 544r–545v; TNA, SP, 79/6, fols. 217r–218v.
TNA, SP, 79/7, fols. 44r–45r; Martoccio, “‘The Place for such Business’,” table 1.
Guido Candiani, “Navi per la nuova marina della Spagna borbónica: L’assiento di Stefano de Mari (1713–1716),” Mediterranea: Richerche storiche 12 (2015), 107–146; Christopher Storrs, The Spanish Resurgence, 1713–1748 (New Haven, 2012), p. 85.
TNA, SP, 79/7, fols. 93r–V, 94r, 117r–V, 119r, and 129r–v; CO, Genoa, 2 December 1713, 20 January 1714, 27 January 1714, and 3 February 1714. The avviso lists these men as “Luigetti, Buiro, and Bursando”, unfortunately omitting their given names and ship names. Yet there is strong evidence to believe that these captains were in fact Paolo Luigetti, Pietro Maria Boero and either Niccolò or Giovanni Battista Burlando as all four sailed in 1708–11 as Genoese navi di guerra. ASG, CM, 406, unfoliated, 27 August 1708, 16 November 1708, 21 January 1709, 28 February 1709, 5 March 1709, 31 May 1709, 7 August 1709, 9 August 1709, 6 February 1710, 12 March 1710, 4 June 1710, 12 November 1710, 22 December 1710, and 10 April 1711. Within a year, both Boero and Burlando took employment with the Knights of Malta to fight the Ottomans. Paolo Giacomone Piana, “La squadra del commendatore de Langon: Cavalieri di Malta su vascelli genovesi nella Guerra di Corfu (1716),” in Riviera di Levante tra Emilia e Toscana: Un crocevia per l’Ordine di San Giovanni, ed. Josepha Costa Restagno (Genoa, 2001), 231–278, pp. 247–248. On the delay see CO, Genoa, 20 January 1714. Also TNA, SP, 79/7, fol. 119r.
TNA, SP, 79/7, fols. 80r, 85r–V, and 87r–V; TNA, SP, 92/27, fol. 619r; CO, Genoa, 5 August 1713, 30 September 1713.
TNA, SP, 79/7, fols. 134r, 135r; CO, Genoa, 15 April 1713, 16 December 1713, 17 March 1714, 23 March 1714, 24 March 1714, and 28 April 1714.
Storrs, The Spanish Resurgence, p. 71.
TNA, SP, 89/26, fol. 49.
TNA, SP, 94/127, fols. 24v, 32v.
Francesco Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009).
Oscar Gelderblom, Francesca Trivellato, “The Business History of the Preindustrial World: Towards a Comparative Historical Analysis,” Business History 61:2 (2019), 225–259; Maria Fusaro, “The Burden of Risk: Early Modern Maritime Enterprise and Varieties of Capitalism,” Business History Review 94:1 (2020), pp. 179–200.
William Caferro, Petrarch’s War: Florence and the Black Death in Context (Cambridge, 2018), p. 180.
This paper draws on research conducted for the project “The European Fiscal-Military System 1530–1870,” which is funded by the European Research Council [ERC] under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 787504). Further details available at https://fiscalmilitary.history.ox.ac.uk/home#/.